Jonathon Penney

Jonathon Penney is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, where he holds the York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law. He is also a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, and a research associate of the Citizens and Technology Lab (CATLab) at Cornell University.

Penney's research focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with an emphasis on AI, machine learning, and automation. His award-winning research has been published in leading law reviews and international conferences and has received coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, and WIRED, among others. His research on the privacy chilling effects of online surveillance won the Reidenberg—Kerr Paper Award at the 2020 Privacy Law Scholars Conference, and his work on the legal risks of adversarial attacks on generative AI systems won the Spotlight Paper Award at the Generative AI and the Law Workshop at the 2024 International Conference on Machine Learning. He is also the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. 

Penney serves on advisory boards for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the Law Commission of Ontario's AI and Administrative Decision-Making Project. He holds a Ph.D. from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and a J.D. from Columbia Law School.